


Optimism

by Soujin



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:49:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soujin/pseuds/Soujin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gareth kills his mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Optimism

**Author's Note:**

> Gaheris and Gareth were initially the same character. A friend asked "does that mean Gareth originally killed Morgause?" Nope, it was Agravain, which makes more sense. But what if it waaaaaas Gareth?
> 
> T.H. White's influence can probably be felt here.

Gareth was optimistic.

Had always been optimistic, despite the flash flood of fucked-up brothers, despite Lot and his overdeveloped sense of irony, despite Morgause and her possessive way with them, even when she was ignoring them. He’d never really bothered to think very hard about _why_ he was so optimistic, but he thought it had something to do with Clarissant.

Clarissant, who was as fucked-up as the rest of them.

Clarissant, who when she wasn’t as purposelessly independent as a wild dog almost seemed to need him, the way she sought him out on her bad days. Who, when she wasn’t murmuring half-coherent fragments of whole thoughts that could piece together magic so strong he could feel it rippling over his skin like the steam above a boiling pot, would end up screaming, her body clenched like a fist, trying to tell him things he couldn’t understand and desperate because her meaning kept getting lost.

Which wasn’t really something to be optimistic about. But he loved Clarissant, the closest to him in age. On Beltane, when the Orkney herdsmen were driving their cattle through the fire and the fishermen were hanging up rowan and hawthorn for luck, she would nestle in the crook of his arm and tell him what was coming.

Gareth would watch the fires and Gawain dancing with sweet country girls with ruddy faces and ruddy hair, their skirts swirling like eddies around their feet. Gawain, the future king, who Gareth was sure was going to be better than Lot--not that Lot had been explicitly bad, but he had a mouth that liked the taste of blood, and spent more time campaigning (and trying to draw that sword) than here in the islands, even though he liked them. Gawain wouldn’t want to abandon the islands. Gawain had promise.

Everyone had this idea that Gareth was stupid because he was optimistic, but he saw more than he said and always had. And Gawain had the kind of promise that could turn a country around, with his broad warm smile and his listening ways and his honest voice that could make a person swear fealty before he stopped to think. Not that it exempted Gawain from the poisonous fucked-up-ening that was recycled through their hearts every time their lungs drew breath and their blood moved steadily on. Gawain had the temper, too. He had the wild blind fury that could overtake him at the wrongest moments, robbing him of all rational thought and ebbing only once too much damage was done to repair. Gareth had only seen him like that once, but once was enough to know it was in there.

Gareth had seen it the day Agravain killed the unicorn after coaxing Clarissant to catch it for him.

Agravain was first and foremost a hunter. Which couldn’t be helped, and could certainly be smelled on him, a sharp smell like sweat and leather and blood mixed with iron, so at least you had fair warning if you were paying attention. Agravain could use a hunting knife the way some people (Gawain, say) could use their words. He was a fine archer, too. And it was the only thing that made him happy. When he wasn’t hunting, it was like someone had stuffed him in a tiny iron-barred cage and left him there, and all he could do was crouch inside it rocking it back and forth with a fury that bordered on desperation, howling and hissing and lashing out any time somebody got close enough.

The day he killed the unicorn, he had found Clarissant in the morning and told her excitedly, “Hey, Clar. Clar. I found a unicorn in the meadow.”

“Balls,” said Clarissant, chewing on a stem of heather. Gareth was sitting in the doorway listening.

“I did. I bet if you went out she’d come to you.”

Clarissant was ten years old. She didn’t have a handle on her magic and it scared her sometimes. Her black hair--she and Mordred were both black-haired, when Agravain and Gawain and Gareth were the same red-gold colour as Lot--was in knots and tangles down her back, burrs and bits of heather stuck in it. The only shift she’d wear was the blue one, and big horseman’s boots on her feet. “You’re tricking me.”

“Am not. She’s a big white one.”

“Lost horse,” Clarissant said angrily. She knew something was wrong, and she knew Agravain wasn’t that nice. Gareth knew it too.

“Oh, fuck that,” Agravain said, irritably. “I know a horse from a unicorn, don’t I?”

“Fine, show me.”

Gareth trotted along after them, quiet in case Agravain decided to send him home. He was eleven, but Agravain still called him runt and ordered him home whenever the fancy struck. Agravain being all of fifteen.

It was a unicorn, anyway. Agravain wasn’t lying about that. Gareth had tried to imagine unicorns before--sometimes when he couldn’t sleep at night he lay on his straw mattress wondering what he’d do if a unicorn or a gryphon or a dragon showed up at the castle and he was the only one who could approach it (kid stuff like that)--but the unicorn was one of those things that you couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t white so much as silver: a shimmery kind of white, its long mane and its tufted tail (not like a horse’s, but like a whip with a tuft at the end of it, slender and snaky) the same constantly-moving frothy shudder of a waterfall.

Clarissant caught her breath. Clarissant was really impressed, and that made Gareth even more awed, because Clarissant wasn’t impressed by much. She held out her hand to the unicorn, and it came to her, making a soft whiffling noise, and laid its head against her neck. Clarissant started to cry.

Gareth ached inside. It was beautiful and he was trying to figure out how you could ever look away, ever turn away from something like that.

And then it screamed, a scream like a panicked woman’s, high in its long throat, and suddenly there was blood pouring out of its side, its neck, like springs in a white field, steadily pouring forth. Gareth spun around so fast his head hurt, and there was Agravain standing with his bow, his face the colour of an ashpit.

Clarissant started screaming too. Her scream was worse than the unicorn’s, because it wasn’t a dying scream, it was a scream like somebody trapped inside her own head, feeling blood spill over her hands and splatter the only blue shift she would wear.

It was the scream that brought Gawain running, Mordred behind him, though by then Gareth had dragged Clarissant away from the dead unicorn and she was screaming into his shoulder. The shoulder was never the same after that. Her screaming felt like a spray of sparks pouring into his skin through his clothes, and he wanted to jerk away from her but he couldn’t, even with her magic running crazy out of her mouth, because he was her favourite and she was his and he couldn’t run away from her now. But afterward his left arm was always weak, and it burned sometimes so that when Lyonors ran her fingertips over it he would flinch.

When Gawain saw them--what an incredible tableau, the dead, bloody unicorn, Clarissant screaming into him, Agravain standing transfixed with his bow in his hand looking like a dead man who was somehow still standing up--that white fury came into his face. Gareth assumed it was for Clarissant, although it could have been for the unicorn. Gawain hit Agravain while he was still running and brought him down to the ground.

He was beyond reasoning then. Mordred had to drag him off while Agravain was still breathing.

And later Gawain apologised, of course, and Agravain grunted unhappily to show he accepted it, but he had a broken rib the court physician had to set, and Gawain spent a night sitting by the fire staring at his hands like he’d never realised they could do something like that. That was how Gareth knew he was scared of it. And Agravain was scared of him. That never mended, unlike the rib. After that it only took a word from Gawain, and Agravain would shape up, no matter what he was doing or how black his mood was. Gawain tried to be gentle with his reprimands, but nothing could make Agravain go back to seeing him the way he had before.

Besides showing off Gawain’s fucked-up streak, it had showed off Agravain’s. Even it he was sorry he’d killed the unicorn, which he obviously was. He’d still done it. Maybe that was part of the lurking misery in him, the tang of inadequacy around him, things a person wouldn’t have guessed he’d feel until they got close enough to smell them, just like the hunter smell.

Mordred’s fucked-up side was a lot subtler to show. It was more like Gareth’s, a quiet narrative going on under the surface, the way Gareth’s optimism was balanced by the part of him that noticed the fucked-up-ness to begin with. You would have thought that it was Morgause that caused it, but all Morgause really did was give him a healthy sense of misogyny, which wasn’t that hard to understand when you realised how her moments of niceness and her cruelty were both just flavours of manipulation.

(Morgause had fucked up Gareth that way, because he didn’t realise for a long time--because he thought that when she was nice, she really meant to be nice. Sort of an unspoken “I love you”, like she wanted to tip him off that somewhere under all the cruelty she really was glad to have him as a son. It was a long time before he realised that the only sense of attachment she felt towards them was a sense of possession, as if instead of children she had a fancy set of chairs and she would have been annoyed if someone took one or scraped the wood finish.)

Mordred just couldn’t stand being responsible for anything, not consciously responsible. Like he just didn’t trust himself to make the right choices.

That, and the way Arthur called him nephew so indulgently, pretending that he (Arthur) had never slept with Morgause, that she had never niced her way into his bedroom by pretending to care about him, as if he were more than just another fancy chair at her dining room table.

Lately, Gareth was glad that Lyonors hadn’t wanted children. He couldn’t imagine what he would do with them. He’d be optimistic--he’d love the hell out of them, just like he loved the hell out of Lyonors, or Clarissant--but he’d always be noticing that streak of fucked-up, however it ended up showing itself. And it would, because it wasn’t just his brothers who had it. It was pretty near everyone at Camelot, everyone with their own special brands of fucked-up to try to hide.

Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t like people, because he did. He liked almost everyone. People in Camelot were interesting, a lot of scholars and knights with their own crazy families, brave men like Sir Lancelot (Gareth loved Sir Lancelot) and smart women like Gawain’s wife Ragnelle, and even the boring people were nice. It was just that he could always see the fucked-up, because everyone had it.

Except maybe Lyonors.

Lyonors never screamed when she couldn’t make words come out the way she wanted, never balked from responsibilities she wasn’t sure she could handle. She had spent five years holed up in her own father’s castle while dozens of bright-hearted young men were slain by the man who tried to lay claim to her, which gave her a good excuse for anything that might be wrong with her, but apart from not wanting children--which Gareth had never broken his heart over--she was as ordinary as heather on a moor.

She looked nothing like anybody in his family. Her hair was long and golden-yellow, curly as a wild pony’s but nowhere near as tangled, always fine as gold embroidery on a tapestry. Her skin was the pale brown of hens’ eggs. Blue-eyed. She was reticent, not outspoken like her sister Lynet, but that didn’t bother him. She talked to _him_. She lay in bed beside him, soothing his left shoulder with her cool fingertips, and just talking in her quiet mourning-dove voice. Soft like most things weren’t in his world of straw mattresses and rough leather clothes and angry waves trying to climb the sea cliffs to swallow the heather moors.

“I love you,” he told her one night.

Lyonors kissed his temple, right above his eye, and it felt like she had left coolness there, too, on his brow. “I love you too,” she said.

He hadn’t spoken the Norn language of Orkney since he’d come to Camelot, but he told her then, so she couldn’t understand, “I’m fucked-up too. Just like they are. You think I’m not because I smile all the time and I’ve never tried to kill someone for shooting a unicorn, but I’m just as fucked-up as the rest of them.”

Lyonors’ blue eyes searched his face, her confusion as gentle as everything else about her. “Gareth--are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said, taking her fingers and kissing them. “Will it be all right if I go back home to visit my sister? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her.”

“Do you want me to come along?” That was all she said. Permission so implicit that asking in the first place had almost been a formality--although he’d never needed formalities with her, not with Lyonors, who could touch his heart just by putting her hand on his chest.

“No. I don’t mean to stay long. I’ll take a fast horse, stay a week. You won’t notice I’m gone,” the corner of his mouth turning up into his less brilliant smile. Lyonors had once said she loved all his smiles. She traced the contours of this one, then smiled back.

“I’ll notice.”

“So will I,” he admitted. “But I need to see her.”

He knew he did. He had known for a few days. It burned in his shoulder, as insanely painful as the day Clarissant had breathed her magic into it, like a torch signal on a black night. Clarissant needed him, or he needed her.

Lyonors just kept smiling, and kissed him again. “I know. Just come back soon.”

She meant it all, too. Gareth had never been a nice piece of furniture in her house. He had always been a man.

He was optimistic about the journey to Orkney, though. Clarissant would be waiting for him, as sure as his shoulder. Maybe waiting in the door for him. Maybe in her room, settled in her chair with her hair full of heather, singing insane songs in Norn, piecing together magic like the carded wool women fed into the spindle, reeling out a whole grey thread as slim and strong as Clarissant herself. Gareth liked that thought. He should bring her something, he decided--once he was already on his way, of course, but luckily the things that Clarissant liked the best were the strange things you found by the side of the road or cheap copper charms in transient markets, or rounded stones that felt good in the hand. Something he could get on the way there.

Although when he got to Orkney, he hadn’t got just a pocketful of stones. He’d stopped somewhere in Scotland and bought her a shawl of dyed green wool, as soft as Lyonors’ voice. She’d probably like the stones better, but the shawl was exactly right for her, especially the way that instead of tassels at the ends the weaver had fastened a fringe of beaten silver discs that jingled together like metallic whispers. More money than he should have spent. Would Clarissant even realise?

Probably not.

She was in the stableyard by the well, feeding the chickens by scattering the grain into patterns and symbols. Gareth watched the chicken-incantation, which was bobbing slightly as the hens pecked and scratched. He wasn’t sure Orkney would feel like home without Clarissant.

He also wasn’t sure how long he stood there watching the chickens before Clarissant turned up at his elbow and started going through his pockets. That woke him up in a hurry.

“Hist wist,” she said. “Mother has a new man.”

“Who?” It felt almost like a scripted response, like saying ‘I’m well’ when someone asks ‘How are you?’ Morgause had had lovers now and then ever since Lot had died. Gareth had always assumed they were just furniture too, or sometimes even as little as kindling (just ashes after a few nights of burning, scattered in the fields when it came time to clean the fireplace).

Clarissant sang, under her breath. “ _Some say the poor man’s made out of mud, some say he’s made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood, skin and bone, a mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong._ ”

“Clar?”

“You know what? This one’s different. He’s going to ask her to marry him.”

“What?” He felt stupid. “Is she going to say yes?”

“Can I see the future? No, just a glass darkly.”

It was a bad day for her. He shouldn’t have pestered; her far-seeing days came and went. Gareth still had his pack over his shoulder, and he unslung it, taking the shawl out for her. “I brought you a present.”

Clarissant took it, passing the soft wool through her hands (they probably smelled like rue. They usually did). Then tears started running down her face, over the wrinkles of her frown, like rain on the sea during a storm. He knew they tasted like the sea, too. Just like he knew her hands smelled like rue and she hadn’t brushed her black hair in at least a month, just like he knew where she had buried her blue shift, the one stained all over with fat brown drops (who’d have guessed that a unicorn would bleed the same colour as any other animal, and that the blood would stain the same ruddy brown?). Then she stopped crying and straightened up, her black eyes as fey as the Folk they tried to appease on Beltane.

“Gareth, it’s your turn. It’s your turn. Someday it won’t be you, you’ll split into two people and one will go free, and you’ll never understand, all your life. But it’s you now.”

The chickens were drifting away from the grain-patterns in the yard. One or two hens remained, dirt-bathing with their feathers fluffed up so they looked twice their proper size, sending out little puffs of fine dust into the cold air. Gareth wished Lyonors were there. He wished he could go up to his old room in the castle and find her there, lie down beside her and take off his tunic, feel her cool fingers on the twinges in his shoulder.

He wished that his fucked-up-ness were something he had always been able to put a finger on, like Gawain’s anger or Agravain’s caged-up hunter’s spirit. The truth was he had never been able to pinpoint it, not more than the knowledge that under his optimism there was that narrative, always running, always noticing, aware of how fucked-up everyone else was.

_It’s your turn._

He was sure he knew what that meant. His turn to find out. Even Clarissant, with her spindles of magic, couldn’t stop that. He had tried to avoid it, God knew, by acting as eager as puppy around his brothers, oblivious to people’s faults, good-natured and quick to take a joke. He had tried to cover up everything else, even around Lyonors.

He bit the inside of his cheek. “Who’s Mother sleeping with?”

“Lamorak de Galis.”

“Is he in love with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he furniture?”

“That doesn’t make any sense. You aren’t making any sense.” She laughed, triumphantly, like she was delighted that it was finally someone _else_ who wasn’t making sense. “What’s in your head?”

Gareth tried to get the corner of his mouth to curl up in a smile, but it wouldn’t. His nails were biting into his palms like little rows of teeth. “Does she like him?”

“She’s had him the longest.” Clarissant leaned forward to him. “I have a question, but you can’t answer it until later. So I guess you’d better go see her. Can’t get out of it. Can’t get off once the ride’s started. Not even if you’re throwing up.”

“Upstairs?” It was the only thing he could get to come out.

“Yeah.”

He still had his pack with him as he climbed the stairs, just a little less full because of Clarissant’s shawl. He was hoping she liked it. Morgause’s room was on the castle’s third floor, up one of the staircases that wound along the stone wall like a coil of rope, with nothing to prevent you from falling off the far side of it if you were stupid or careless. He walked with his shoulder to the wall, his left shoulder, letting the cold, moist stone ease the burning a little. They’d never been able to get the damp out of the castle, as much as various day-labourers had tried. Morgause hated it. But she hated Orkney.

When he got to her room at the top of the stairs he rapped sharply on the door and then went in, through her quiet anteroom and into her bedroom.

He heard the soft murmur before he got there, a murmur as soft as Lyonors’ voice when she was lying next to him in bed. It made him feel as though there were a thin skim of dirt over his skin. Then he pushed aside the curtain and saw her--saw them, Morgause and the man, Lamorak, a young man, much too young to be sleeping with a woman who was only nice when it suited her purposes. They were both naked, but sitting up in bed together talking, her fingers trailing through his hair.

Lamorak started up indignantly--no doubt worried about Morgause’s honour, in that way only the young and chivalrous can be--but Morgause stayed him with a hand on his arm. Gareth decided that he might have a fever, because his head was starting to pound, in a hot, sticky, slow way.

“Don’t lie to him,” he said.

“Gareth--”

“You lie to us and get away with it because we’re all fucked up. Even me. But he’s just a kid. Why does it feel like there’s two people inside me? Clar said some day I’ll split into two people.” He didn’t even notice his voice start to strain with pleading. “I’ve got Lyonors, and she’s perfect, and people are all essentially good. I have lots of friends. That part of me’s fine. Why won’t the other part ever be happy unless you love me?”

“Gareth,” she said, in a voice so soothing his head almost stopped pounding. “Everything is all right.”

Except that he knew she was lying now. There wasn’t enough optimism in the world to cover that up. She was lying, and all of a sudden he hated her for it. He’d brought his sword along, just like all knights did, in case of a challenge or a bit of trouble on the road, and it was still bucked around his waist. Drawing it was the work of one smooth moment. After all, he’d trained under Lancelot. If Sir Lancelot couldn’t teach you to be a good swordsman, you might as well just give up (except that Gareth, being Gareth, would never have said that anyone should give anything up, would always have offered encouragement to anyone).

He vaguely saw Lamorak stumble out of the bed, digging through his clothes (for his own sword?); more clearly he saw Morgause looking at him, all trace of the lie gone from her face. She looked like she was daring him, like she didn’t believe he was actually going to go through with it. He wouldn’t have believed he was actually going to go through with it, either, if Clarissant hadn’t told him.

And then all of a sudden he couldn’t see anything except blood. He heard a clatter--Lamorak? or had he dropped his sword?--but that was all. And he felt himself fall.

When he opened his eyes again, wiping the half-dried blood out of them, Lamorak was gone. But Morgause wasn’t. She was lying on the bed in more blood than he had ever seen in his life. And Gareth, poor fucked-up Gareth, who had always been optimistic and genuinely believed that everybody had something good to offer, who tendered mercy more than any other man in Camelot because he hated the idea of killing someone when there was still that nutmeat of good inside the armoured shell--well, that was who had killed her. His own mother.

He lay down on the floor and cried and cried, until his stomach ached and he felt dizzy. After that he was so exhausted he fell asleep.

The next morning he came back down the stairs, rubbing his arms and wishing his head was still fever-vague, so he could distance himself from the body upstairs. When he came out in the courtyard, Clarissant was waiting for him, wrapped in the green shawl.

“Hey,” he said tiredly.

“Your turn,” she said. “Now it’s over.”

“No more?”

“No.”

“Good.” He sat down wearily on a stone bench. Clarissant sat down beside him.

“I’m sorry.”

It meant more coming from her. Maybe because she never said she was sorry about anything, maybe because she knew what had happened up there without him saying a word. Maybe because she had always been his favourite and he had always been hers, because she was the one who had always made him hope for the best. He nodded.

Clarissant put her hand on his arm. “Said I’d ask--”

“Yeah. What’s the question?”

She whispered. “Is her blood the same colour as the unicorn’s?”

Gareth really did throw up then. She brought him some beer, and after he’d drunk and little and gotten the taste out of his mouth, he said, “Same colour.”

Clarissant rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, wrapped up in her shawl like a selkie in a seal coat. “I’ll show you where to bury your clothes.”


End file.
